Wulf's Web-Den

Just a short hat tip to Adam today, who has discovered that those sagacious Muppets can teach us everything we need to know about comments in the context of social media.

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It was a long time ago that I last redesigned my website. I think at that point, 800x600 was still a fairly common screen resolution and I had also been experimenting with accessing my site on my Palm Pilot. I decided to ditch side columns and allow the content to stretch all the way across.

This liquid layout worked with smaller browsing windows but resulted in uncomfortably long lines at what became more common settings. From a visual point of view, it also made it impossible to judge what a paragraph of text would look like - a page filling monster or a measly line or two.

Last night I finally got round to tweaking the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) that creates the visual appearance of the site. I have opted for a single, relatively narrow, 560px wide column for the main content block, although the top and bottom of the page are still allowed to stretch. Along with a larger font, I think the result is more aesthetically pleasing although a little bit more browser testing is still due.

I might make a few more tweaks before I am done but I think this has been a worthwhile step forward. What do you think?

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web design

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I saw my first spam comment today since installing the Disqus system a few weeks ago. It was quickly and easily dealt with though so spam isn't a big problem at the moment.

By and large, I am pleased with how the system is working. It certainly allows me to claw back the bit of time it took to select a new Flickr picture for each new comment theme and has garnered a bit more response than that system did. The only downside is that the Disqus component sometimes makes the page take longer to load (although you can avoid that by keeping up to date with my blog's RSS feed).

All in all, a decent solution to the question of how to quickly and easily improve commenting on my blog.

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After getting comments added to the blog, I have found myself too busy to get round to much posting. I seem to have been making almost daily trips to Argos, particularly buying up their "Maine" modular storage system (on special offer at the moment) and building a shelving solution to house our books and other things.

We still have not finished but I think it is fair to say that we are at least making progress. I think I had better hold off promising a return to daily blogging for just a while longer though!

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I am trying out a new comments system using Disqus. Sometimes I get comments via my home-brewed Flickr-based system but it does not feel that they come often enough to entirely warrant the work in setting each one up (finding the next suitable picture and adding it to the end of the blog post). I have considered changes before, including third party systems and writing my own but, a couple of years on, have not managed to find time to get it done!

The current version of Disqus was easy to integrate and you can sign in to post comments using a range of ids. I will be interested to see if this encourages more discussion although, since the primary purpose of my blog is to allow friends and family to see that I'm alive and well, I shall not be too disappointed if it does not.

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Not enough time to get into blogging today... and now I want to pop outside for a bit to see if I can grab some firework images.

Time for a short intermission as I'm away with my church at Ashburnham this weekend. No post tomorrow and perhaps not on Sunday either.

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intermission